Sunday, October 30, 2011

Three of the 187,888 lakes in Finland

While I was returning from the workshop at Noordwijk, a colleague on the same bus to the train station asked: "They say it is a land of thousands of lakes, but how many lakes are there in Finland?"

I should have know, but only managed to say: "One hundred thousand." Later I checked this out, and I had been too modest.

The number of lakes depends on the definition, but if we take the mimimum size of a lake to be 0.05 hectares, then there are 187,888 lakes in Finland. Of these 56,000 are more than one hectare in size. (See the Finnish Wikipedia for more details.)

Anyway, today I walked around three of those 187,888 lakes, in the Luukki forests: Väärälampi, Mustlampi and Halkolampi. All of these are much larger than the miminum size of a lake in the definition, despite the word "lampi", pond, in the lake names.

Today it was clouded, and there were few autumn colors left, but it was nice to be out walking.

The same colleague who asked about the lakes asked also: "What do you do with all the photographs you take? Do you store them all and process them on the computer?"

I answered that I delete most of them, without going into details.

But here is my recipe for post-processing: Transfer the photographs to Aperture from the memory card using a workflow which stores them in a convenient location. Then go very fast through the photographs, and delete 90-95% of them during the first round. And then you may delete some more.

I rarely do any other post-processing besides deleting, except once in a while I adjust the exposure of a photograph if there is a real need for it.

During the dark season of the year I might shoot RAW and process the files in noise-reduction software, but so far there hasn't been a real need to do this. Almost always I use JPEG format, and try to get the photograph right in the camera.

In the last three months I have taken 31,000 photographs with the Panasonic LX5. And before the LX5 I used the LX3, taking 203,318 photographs with it until it got broken in a thunderstorm.

Speaking of photography, at TOP there is a posting written by Kirk Tuck, and he goes deeply into photography blogging and the reasons why gear-related postings generate so much feedback but other subjects go uncommented.

The big insight in the posting was that although the non-gear topics are seldom commented, reading them is an important daily ritual for many people. Well, I guess life (and photography) is so complicated that it often is hard to know what to say. Gear is so much easier to talk about.

And that goes for me too. I have often neglected to comment even though I have seen a beautiful photograph or an insightful posting. I'm indebted to Andreas, Markus, Mark, and all the other photography bloggers who are presenting such deep things to ponder.

4 comments:

I'd never thought about reading photography blogs as "a ritual", but it certainly is. I'm pretty much fed up with gear related blogs and like you am grateful for more thought provoking types of posts. You are right, gear related posts are usually too lightweight and just boring. I always enjoy your posts and find what you do with your LX cameras to be inspirational. I too am remiss when it comes to making sufficient comments!

Well, I know that comments are not only valuable feedback but foremost the nourishment that keeps a blogger going, but then, in so many cases I find that I have little to say. I enjoy the images, like "Birches" on your last post ("last" relative from "here"), have my Doctor Zhivago associations, those private associations that seem so random to other people and that are only explainable from my youth, and then, rather than saying something banal, I just go on. I can only hope that you understand.

About Me

Juha Haataja works with information techology to support education, research, and culture. His hobbies include photography, literature, and outdoor activities. He lives in the capital region of Finland.